I had a question ready about what it was like to move home from Nashville. I never got to ask it, because the premise was wrong.
“It's a common misconception that I lived in Nashville,” John Paul White told me about six minutes in. “I never did.”
I made my hay here, and by the time I could afford to, I didn't want to.
For two decades — writing for EMI, BMG and Warner/Chappell, then as half of The Civil Wars, then on his own — he was driving two and a half hours up, sleeping on couches for a few days, and driving back. He has lived in the Shoals since his early twenties. On Episode 123 of Unexpected Adventures in North Alabama, we talked about the talent show that changed his life, why his recording studio is still somebody's house, what the Muscle Shoals legacy actually did for his generation, and where he sends people when they come to Florence.
“And It Was News to Me”
He was born in Muscle Shoals and grew up in Loretto, Tennessee, on a chicken farm, thirty miles and one state line away. This was pre-internet and pre-cable. His whole music education was whatever records his parents and neighbors had, plus Top 40 radio. His dad played old country and, John Paul says, would argue to this day that country died around 1980. His mom played crooners and show tunes — Johnny Mathis, Dean Martin, the West Side Story soundtrack.
“If I'm zooming out and listening to the body of my work,” he said, “you could probably tell that's the case.”
Nobody in his family played. Nobody in Loretto made a living at music. Then some friends who actually were musicians entered a talent contest, planning to lip sync AC/DC's “Back in Black,” and he ended up as the singer because he was the one who knew all the words.
At the practice, he sang “Stand By Me” into the microphone just to get a level.
“Like the proverbial record scratched, and everybody stared at me like, ‘You can sing.’ And it was news to me.”
He was obsessed after that, but he still didn't think it was a job. “I thought I'd go get a real job,” he said. Things just kept getting a little bigger. “It's incredibly hard to make a living. And even if you are, it's a tough way of life. It's not for the meek. You have to be a little bit crazy, I think, and I am.”
The Move That Never Happened
When he was young, he told me, your hometown is the lamest place on earth. He figured he'd end up in Nashville or New York or LA, where the jobs were. He couldn't afford to.
So he stayed, and made it work from here, and somewhere in there the math flipped.
He's clear-eyed about why that was lucky. “If I lived in an industry town, I think I'd probably work myself to death, 'cause there's always an opportunity.” Somebody's co-write fell through. Somebody needs a guitar part, a harmony. “I would've done it all. I would've never flinched.”
Here, he said, he's forced to take a breath — and that's what lets him run headlong into the next thing.
I told him I did a version of the same thing: left for college certain I was never coming back, ended up home about eleven years later, no regrets.
“It happens,” he said. “Either people get out forever, or they get sucked back in before you know it.”
A House That Is Still a House
He recorded parts of Beulah and The Hurting Kind at FAME in Muscle Shoals. But most of the work now happens at Sun Drop Sound, a turn-of-the-century house next door to his own in Florence's historic district. The commute is about twenty yards.
I asked what that room gives him that a big studio can't.
He has worked in plenty of proper studios — acoustically treated, isolation booths, floors floated off the ground so no vibration gets through. “That's all great,” he said. But there's something else in those rooms.
“You feel the clock ticking. You know this place is expensive. Whether you're paying for it or not, you can just tell everything in here is expensive.”
His place is still a house. The control room is the master bedroom. He has kept it that way on purpose, so people relax. “I always tend to perform better and create better in spaces like that than something that feels a little more corporate.”
FAME still comes into play when he needs a bigger room — when there's a band and you want everybody looking at each other.
“They Treated Me Like an Equal When I Was Nobody”
Here is where I expected a tourism answer and got something more honest.
I asked whether living inside the Muscle Shoals legacy — Aretha, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan — is a weight or a gift. A gift, he said, no question. And then he complicated it.
In the '80s and '90s, he said, there wasn't much going on here. The city spent most of its energy promoting the past for tourism, “as they should, because we're all incredibly proud of that music. But that wasn't doing us, my generation, any good.” The places to play kept closing, and communities weren't eager to let new ones open. By the end of the '90s the live scene had largely died. That, he said, is why a band like the Drive-By Truckers ended up in Athens, Georgia.
What saved it for him wasn't the history. It was the people who made it, still walking around.
I got to learn from David Hood and Spooner Oldham and Jimmy Johnson, and they treated me like an equal when I was nobody. And when you live here and you see those guys at the coffee shop or at the restaurant, you realize — okay, they did it from here. They never left here. Why can't I?
“I don't think a lot of communities can say that,” he added. “If I was born in Kansas I probably would not have felt like the dreams were realizable.”
Then the 2013 Muscle Shoals documentary came out — he's in it — and something shifted. A lot of people who live here learned their own history from that film. “Everybody got a little more proud of it and a little more willing to support it and help it grow again.”
His verdict on the scene right now: “It's more vital than it has been in my career.”
Not a Record Label. A Co-Op.
He didn't dream of running a label either. What he had was a lot of nights sitting around with other artists complaining about labels.
“We would all bellyache about labels and how they were the devil — which isn't true, but when you're an artist, it just never feels like they're doing enough.”
Single Lock started with a conversation between Ben Tanner — John Paul's studio partner, and formerly of Alabama Shakes — and Will Trapp, who works in finance and loves music. Their question was simple: what do artists around here actually need to succeed?
The answer was money. Enough to quit one of their three jobs. Enough for a van. Enough to make a record in a real studio with a real producer, and to get CDs and records and merch printed to sell on the road.
There was no big marketing budget and no radio promo budget. “We pretty much just put them in a van and filled the tank up and said, ‘Go get to work.’” Fifty-fifty partnership. He lobbied against calling it a record label at all.
“What we do feels more like a co-op. Sometimes it feels like philanthropy, to be honest.”
Thirteen years in, the thing he keeps coming back to is that it's still here. “There's a lot of labels that can't say that.”
Huntsville and the Shoals
We just spent an episode on what Huntsville has built, so I wanted the view from the other end of the region.
“You can bet we're paying attention,” he said. There's a lot happening there he'd love to grow here — though he's realistic about why it's harder. Huntsville is the biggest city in the state now. More people, more money, more appetite.
And the Shoals still carries a hangover from the '90s. “People got so used to not going and listening to live music here that sometimes it's a chore to get people out of their apartments or their homes and go to a show. Which is so strange to say about a town with such music history.”
But it's improving, and he credits ShoalsFest with proving the point: people will come here if the event is great.
He also thinks the two towns are knitting back together. For most of his life, he said, the Shoals felt disconnected — not just from Huntsville but from Birmingham, Memphis, even Nashville — which wasn't true in the '60s and '70s, when the ties ran to Memphis, Chicago, Detroit and Macon. Now there's more cross-pollination than there used to be.
His phrase for it was one I'd heard from Huntsville's music officer two weeks earlier, almost word for word: all boats rise.
He's living the collaboration, too. This past June he headlined the very first show presented by the new Tangled String Syndicate at the Straight to Ale Speakeasy in Huntsville, with Common Man opening.
Who to Listen to Right Now
I asked who deserves attention past the marquee names. He apologized for not having a better finger on the pulse of a small town, and then rattled off a list.
Caleb Elliott — “a brilliant artist,” with a new trio. Carver Commodore, who he says live in Huntsville and the Shoals both. Billy Allen + The Pollies, who are touring hard; Single Lock put out a record on The Pollies, and Billy joined later. “He's one of the best vocalists I've ever heard. It blows my mind listening to him sing.”
And Gary Nichols, from Tuscumbia, who had a long run with the SteelDrivers and is doing his own thing now.
I mentioned that when I heard Gary play at the governor's conference and learned he'd been in the SteelDrivers, my first thought was Chris Stapleton — and then: this is all right here.
John Paul enjoyed that. “What huge shoes to have to fill. Chris is next level. He's an alien.” Then the part most people don't know: the SteelDrivers won their Grammy with Gary out front, not Chris.
“There's really no shortage of great talent around here. It takes a lot of perseverance, it takes a lot of willpower, it takes a lot of luck. But there's plenty of people that have got what it takes.”
John Paul's Florence
I asked where he'd send someone building a trip around all of this. He didn't hesitate.
Do the studio tours. FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound, both. Non-negotiable.
Helen Keller's birthplace in Tuscumbia, where the well is still standing — the one where she learned the word water.
Downtown Florence, which he remembers as tumbleweeds in the '90s and now calls a great place to hang.
Odette on North Court Street. “I'll put it up there against any restaurant, especially the farm-to-table type thing.”
Yumm Thai: Sushi and Beyond, directly across the street. “I'd also put it up with anybody.”
Bunyan's Bar-B-Que on the west side, known for a hot mustard slaw he swears is the most addictive thing going.
Staggs Grocery in the Sweetwater District of East Florence for a burger. “It's been there forever, and it's a staple.”
Billy Reid's flagship store. Billy designed everything John Paul wore during the Civil Wars years. All those suits.
And then the one he most wanted people to know about: Tom's Wall.
Tom Hendrix spent more than thirty years building an unmortared stone wall on his property off the Natchez Trace, one rock at a time, as a monument to his great-great-grandmother Te-lah-nay — a Yuchi woman who was forced to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears and walked back to the Singing River. It's the largest unmortared wall in the United States and the largest memorial to a Native American woman. Hendrix died in 2017; his family keeps it open.
John Paul is not a man who reaches for the word spiritual.
“More often than not, I'll smirk when somebody talks about a place being spiritual. I'm always like, I'd have to see that to believe it.” He paused. “But every time I go, and every time I send somebody there — I don't know how to describe it. It's kind of an out-of-body experience.”
“Nobody Knew What They Were Doing”
I close every episode by asking what has surprised the guest most. His answer is the thing he tells his students at the University of North Alabama, where he teaches songwriting.
“As I worked my way through the ranks, I started realizing that nobody knew what they were doing.”
You spend your whole youth assuming everyone else has more information than you do — that your ideas aren't good yet, that the heavyweights with the experience are the ones with the answers. “And I started realizing the more I did it that was not true. It's a pretty equal playing field.”
He called it disappointing and liberating at the same time. “Oh, I can do this. I don't have to have their counsel, 'cause they're trying to figure it out as they go, just like I am.”
Which leads him somewhere useful for anybody making anything:
“We all want to sign that record deal that makes you millions of dollars overnight. Typically that's not how it works. And typically if you do, it's probably not the record label — it's the music that you've made. It's still all about songs and records.”
Plan Your Trip
The Music Trail of North Alabama is our digital passport covering the studios, the venues, the festivals — everything music in the region. Check in at stops and earn prizes like T-shirts and guitar picks.
A few practical notes before you go. Bunyan's and Staggs are both weekday operations — Staggs closes at 2 p.m. and neither is open Saturday or Sunday. Odette is closed Sunday and Monday. Tom's Wall is at 13890 County Road 8, just off the Natchez Trace at milepost 338, open daily; call Florence/Lauderdale Tourism if you want to line up a guided visit.
And if you're reading this the weekend it goes up: ShoalsFest is at McFarland Park in Florence on October 3 and 4.
For John Paul's music, tour dates and everything Single Lock has coming, he says go old school and start at the websites — johnpaulwhite.com and singlelock.com.
Listen to the Full Conversation
There's more in the episode than fit here: why writing songs over Zoom during the pandemic didn't work (you can't sing harmony with a lag), what he thinks artists actually need from a label, his case for which streaming service pays musicians best, and the project he has percolating that he couldn't talk about yet.
Listen to Episode 123 with John Paul White on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
